The work of Mira Sanders combines the art of drawing with that of video, photography, and journals. Her drawings show a continuous tension between the endless horizon, foot holes in liberty and those which, on the other hand, order and frame spaces. This tension refers to politics (spaces in which we live) as well as the pure signification of drawing – the white sheet of paper as a space of inscription. Silent Letter is divided into six monitors. Five of them present a video sequence in which lines of sharing, contours, observation, positioning in the landscape, urban space, and the artist studio, are introduced. Each video, inscribed with a date, delivers the story of a foreign observer. This story is subtitled on a black screen. The colour black becomes, for a moment, a sequence of still and/or moving images, before reappearing as a story again. On the 6th monitor a series of quotations are running across the screen, raising the question of line and boundary.

In the Silent Letter of the 19th January 2009, kites are drawing lines above a coastal landscape. The sky turns into a white sheet on which the artist (the kite) can draw. “Through the line and the in-depth way of looking, I reveal. Permeated by the eyes, each detail and trace, each scar is perceptible. I draw situations, people, places... over there and here. I wander around this line.”(...) “There are guards at certain points on the line. They’re armed. They look serious. No question of making fun, or light. They don’t like you observing. Or in any event, that’s the impression you get. The line is drawn on my white sheet of paper. It’s futile and clumsy. Will anyone be able to read what it means or describes?”(...) “The eye focused on the city. Today it will be this particular street, these particular people, this particular building, tomorrow something else. Or... should I go back and start all over again?”

In the letter of the 27th April 2008, the observer arrives for the first time in a town. He notices that sometimes the inhabitants move and act according to invisible lines: “They put borders wherever they want. To preserve silence and noise ordered. (...) But when this order is invisible they can’t imagine the line.”

The reference and the drawing, this time directly on the sheet of paper in the piece Dialogue de Sourds, raise questions and answers of another epistolary kind. A dialogue that started in 2005 between the artist and Marie-Pascale Gildemyn, art critic and art historian. Through open letters, the dialogue breaks the silence or fill it. Mira Sanders sends a drawing to which the recipient reacts. The dialogue’s visual snatches are memos, sketches “ripped out” from a drawing book and framed. Each exhibition marks a new choice among some twenty drawings realized by now. Paradis artificiel. Paradis perdu. Paradou introduces a vignette (or the basic drawing of a screen) which surrounds a palm tree. The title has been written in pencil below the vignette and acts like a stand. It suggests tracks of interpretation to the recipient. Her answers are not known from us. We can suggest they lead to the

creation of another drawing and so forth. Thus, the narrative line is divided: the spectator must complete it or not.

The series of photographs Scale 1: 2500 (studio #1) display up-close views of work tables and street details which seem to have been noticed by an external observer. Scale 1: 2500 (studio #1) (2009) shows a cutting board on which the leftovers of an activity create an urban landscape and his monuments. The cutter’s traces on the board, similar to scars, evoke a cartography of visible and invisible lines, that we can no longer read, pointing towards the possibility of deviation. The implicit relation with the workshop practice in Scale 1: 2500 (studio #1) becomes explicit in the series Borders (2009). The word Border in English, comes from the hand-craft creation practiced in some leisure1 centers. On A0 white sheets, object outlines (scissors, screwdriver, points...) are pushed back and organized on the edge of the sheet in order to construct a frame. The central space of the

sheet, left empty, is transformed into a projection space, a place for possible inscriptions.

Eva Gonzàlez-Sancho & Frédéric Oyharçabal

Appendix:

Deviation: departure from a standard or norm, from Moral (the guardians), and from Reason.

To scent: to perceive or recognize by or as if by the sense of smell. To smell with insistance like a dog do.

To sense, to perceive.

1. Leisure or hobby refers to the activity one does during the time one has outside his usual occupations and

the restraints produced by them. It is also called free time. This free time is usual spend in non economically

productive activities which are often cultural or playfull: DIY activity, gardening, sports...